Wednesday, May 17, 2017

How to block anti-Trump twitter spammers.

As anyone who has used twitter for more than five minutes will already realize, twitter's algorithms are frustratingly politically biased. As a result, the top replies to pretty much every one of President Trump's tweets are filled with angry hate-filled spammers going off on incoherent hate-filled rants. You will also notice that many of these spam replies are from verified accounts, and yet most of these verified accounts belong to total nobodies.

Why do twitter give these total nobodies verified accounts, given that they are total nobodies? It's because verified accounts are given greater precedence in the twitter algorithms, so by allowing Trump-hating nobodies to become verified accounts, it helps ensure that the top replies to President Trump's tweets will always be from angry Trump-hating nobodies.

It's sad to think that there are people who are so obsessed with President Trump that they resort to online stalking like this, but as well as being sad, it's also annoying. It's frustrating that twitter care more about pushing an agenda and suppressing the voice of Donald Trump supporters than they do about providing a satisfying user experience, but there is a way to fight back against twitter spam.

Twitter allow you to block annoying twitter users, but of course it would take a very long time to block all of the spammers on President Trump's account. However, fortunately there's a quicker way to block hundreds of spammers in one go. Here's a step by step guide:

Step 1 - Settings & Privacy

First, go to your twitter account and click on your profile photo in the top right corner, then click 'Settings and privacy'.

Step 2 - Blocked accounts

Next, click on the 'Blocked accounts' option at the left hand side of the screen.

Step 3 - Import a list

This will bring up a list of the accounts you're already blocking. Click on the 'Advanced options' button at the right, and then click 'Import a list'.

Before you can import a list, you need a csv file containing the anti-Trump verified nobodies that you wish to block.

Step 4 - Download the list of accounts to block

A download page should open in a new browser tab. Simply click the download button on that page to download the list.

Depending on your browser settings, it may bring up the option to open or save the file. If you see the following box, select 'Save file' then click 'OK'.

Step 5 - Upload the list of accounts to block

Finally, click on 'Attach a file to upload' and upload the csv file which you downloaded from step 4.

Once the list is uploaded to twitter, it takes around 10-15 minutes for twitter to block the verified nobodies from your account. You can continue to use twitter while this takes place in the background, or you can come back to twitter later when the verified nobodies will no longer appear in the replies to President Trump's tweets. In fact they won't appear anywhere on your twitter feed!

Blocking these anti-Trump spam accounts means they get less views, and this in turn lowers their rankings in the twitter algorithms, making their spam less likely to be seen by twitter users who haven't yet blocked them. So by blocking these verified nobodies, you are helping to make twitter a better product for fellow Trump followers.

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This is the Tl;dr of how to block anti-Trump verified nobodies on twitter:

Related:

Twitter aren't the only social media website to have frustrating algorithms which are user-unfriendly for Trump supporters. Facebook have openly admitted to using Hillary-apologist websites such as Snopes (Hahahahahaha, hahaha. hahaha! Seriously facebook!? Snopes!?) to 'verify' news stories1 which appear in user's feeds, and potentially bury stories which Snopes don't approve of.

Using a website like Snopes is obviously a big dent to facebook's credibility, and the whole concept of censoring stories based on the opinion of a clearly politically motivated panel is a big blow to freedom of speech and freedom of information. It's also incredibly patronizing of facebook to imply that the public can't be trusted to think for ourselves. However, even if 'fact-checking' websites had any credibility, it would still raise the question, who fact checks the fact checkers?

So if you want to fight back against facebook's censorship you can use the following step by step guide to delete your advert interests and ensure that facebook get less advertising revenue:How to delete your facebook advert interests.